At first, Marc Handler ignored the pickup trucks loaded with scrap metal, machine components and other junk parked on the street outside his North Hollywood home. He hoped they would simply go away. But the number of trucks only increased, from three to as many as 15. Sometimes the clanging and banging would stir Handler from his sleep in the wee hours. "I feel that I am now living in a blighted area full of smashed-up vehicles and piles of scrap metal and junk — an industrial area of workmen and industrial materials, not a neighborhood," said Handler, who lives in a house he bought from his grandparents 20 years ago. "This is in my face every day."

The heaps of steel wheels, rusty nails and dented appliances at Schnitzer Steel's scrap yard along Highway 99 in west Eugene look like a bunch of junk. But that junk is worth millions of dollars. The Eugene operation generated about $16 million in revenue in the fiscal year ended last Aug. 31. Bankrolled by its initial public offering in 1993 and a subsequent offering last month, Schnitzer has renovated its facilities, including the Eugene site, and is looking for new acquisitions.

NEW YORK -- When dozens of little American flags began disappearing from Civil War veterans' graves at a cemetery in Hudson, N.Y., this month, locals fumed. Who could be so callous, especially in the days surrounding Independence Day? Thanks to surveillance cameras, a stepped-up police presence and forensic sleuthing, officials have the answer: woodchucks, also known as groundhogs. The animals apparently were burrowing beneath the ground, then taking the flags into their subterranean homes, where investigators poking cameras into the dirt have spotted some of the missing banners.

A million tons of radioactive scrap metal may find a new shelf-life in products ranging from soup cans and wristwatches to automobiles and artificial hips. It would be a mammoth recycling project for a legacy of the Nuclear Age. Under a proposal being considered by the Bush administration, the federal government is seeking new uses for lightly contaminated metal as it cleans up its obsolete weapon plants and research labs.

There's something big and metallic 60 feet below the ground in this town near the Czech border. Whether it's the fabled Russian Amber Room, gold or even scrap metal isn't known. But treasure hunter Christian Hanisch hopes to snake a camera into an underground cavern to prove he has discovered Nazi plunder buried in the final weeks of World War II. "I am sure that there is gold or silver down there," said Hanisch, who hopes to begin drilling within days. Hanisch was led to the spot on the fringes of Deutschkatharinenberg, about 100 yards from the Czech Republic, by a set of coordinates he found in a notebook belonging to his father, a former Luftwaffe radio operator who died last year.

In a series of raids this month, Argentine authorities have discovered clandestine arsenals containing hundreds of tons of bullets, artillery shells and other ammunition. The judge handling the case has assured the public that it appears to be merely a matter of corruption and not part of a plot by right-wing extremists to undo the democratic government. The ammunition, along with miles of stolen public telephone wire, apparently was to be melted down for its copper.

November 20, 2005 | Kim Murphy and Mayerbek Nunayev, Special to The Times

The Russian soldiers were drunk when they started flagging down cars and demanding money one night last week in this suburb of the Chechen capital, witnesses say. By the time the night was over, three civilians were dead and three of the Russians' uniforms were soaked in blood.

Morrie Markoff is not now and has never been a man of half measures. When he saw Depression-era evictions in his New York tenement, he became a fiery political activist. When he trained as a machinist, he was top of his class. When he argued with his wife, he left nothing in the tank. There's much to be learned from people like Markoff, who died briefly in 2012, but, true to his nature, clawed his way back to life. "His heart stopped, his eyes shut, his mouth fell open and his tongue dropped out," Morrie's daughter Judy said to me in an email, adding that the grieving family retreated to Good Samaritan Hospital's meditation room.

Dan Giles does not call himself a religious man. But he has, he says, respect for God, those who worship, and monuments inspired by faith. All of which leads the 60-year-old welder from Silver Lake to a quandary when he considers the stack of wrought iron gates resting in his yard: He got them as scrap and now figures they'll fetch $50,000. For decades, the eight gold-painted gates, each weighing several hundred pounds, adorned the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe at St.

MEXICO CITY -- Authorities sought at least two thieves on Thursday who had seized a truck with radioactive material in central Mexico, while a family who found and took home the exposed stolen container was under medical observation, officials said. The truck was hijacked Monday by gunmen who intercepted it north of Mexico City. It was transporting a large amount of highly active cobalt-60, a radioactive substance used in the treatment of cancer, from a hospital in Tijuana to a nuclear waste storage dump near the capital.